Five-minute digest
North and South
Summary
North and South is a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell, serialized in Charles Dickens's weekly magazine Household Words from September 1854 to January 1855 and published in an expanded two-volume edition by Chapman and Hall in 1855. It contrasts the rural, traditional south of England with the industrial north through the story of Margaret Hale. Margaret, raised largely in London with her wealthy aunt, Mrs. Shaw, returns to her family's parsonage at Helstone in Hampshire, which she loves. Soon afterward her father, Mr. Hale, resigns his position as a clergyman because of religious doubts, and moves the family to Milton, a smoky northern manufacturing town modeled on Manchester, where he works as a private tutor. His most interesting pupil is John Thornton, a self-made cotton-mill owner who lives with his formidable mother. Margaret at first scorns Milton's commercial values and Thornton's attitude toward his workers. She befriends Nicholas Higgins, a union man, and his daughter Bessy, who is dying of a lung disease caused by cotton fluff in the carding-room. During a strike, a crowd attacks Thornton's mill; Margaret shields him and is struck by a stone, and when he proposes the next day she refuses him. Her mother falls fatally ill, and her brother Frederick, exiled after a naval mutiny, returns secretly to see her; to protect him Margaret tells a lie to the police, which Thornton, a magistrate, quietly covers. A desperate striker, John Boucher, takes his own life. After her father and his old friend Mr. Bell die, Margaret returns to London and inherits Mr. Bell's fortune, including the property on which Thornton's mill stands. When the mill fails, she offers him the capital to continue, and the two at last acknowledge their love. Dickens chose the title; Gaskell had preferred to call the book after her heroine. It is now regarded as one of the major Victorian industrial novels.
Top Lessons
Masters and men
Gaskell shows the conflict between mill owners and workers from both sides. Students can examine how understanding grows between Thornton and Higgins.
Pride and prejudice in a new setting
Margaret and Thornton both misjudge each other at first. The novel traces how first impressions give way to respect.
Conscience and truth
Mr. Hale leaves the Church for conscience, Frederick defies an unjust captain, and Margaret tells a lie to save her brother. Readers can weigh when principle requires sacrifice.
Verified Quotes
“I would rather be a man toiling, suffering—nay, failing and successless—here, than lead a dull prosperous life in the old worn grooves of what you call more aristocratic society down in the South, with their slow days of careless ease.”
“Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used—not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.”
“I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own”
“I began to work in a carding-room soon after, and the fluff got into my lungs, and poisoned me.”
Medical Lens
Bessy Higgins is dying of a lung disease caused by cotton dust in the carding-room, which the novel links to employers' reluctance to install ventilating wheels; Mrs. Hale's fatal illness, attended by Dr. Donaldson, and the deaths of Mr. Hale and Mr. Bell bring repeated scenes of grief, and the striker Boucher drowns himself.
- Chapter XIII: Soft Breeze in a Sultry Place
Bessy describes the fluff that poisoned her lungs and the cost of ventilating wheels.
- Chapter XV: Masters and Men
Dr. Donaldson is called to Mrs. Hale.
- Chapter XXXVI: Union Not Always Strength
Boucher's body is brought home after he drowns himself.